No one — or mostly no one — truly believes the swirl of headlines surrounding Bill and Hillary Clinton in the summer of 2013 should lead to a grand conclusion about whether another iteration of a Clinton campaign can be run effectively, free of the internecine warfare and incessant drama that marked her 2008 bid.

But if Clinton and her supporters were hoping to allay those doubts well ahead of a possible 2016 run, the past few months have not been helpful.

Clinton supporters would point out, fairly, that much of what has happened to them this summer — the steady stream of unseemly stories about Anthony Weiner’s continued virtual liaisons, his wife and Clinton confidante Huma Abedin’s very public decision to stand by him, and reports of mismanagement at the Clinton Foundation — has been beyond their control.

But it has all still renewed the question that hangs over Hillary Clinton: Has she learned from the mistakes of the past, and can she finally break some recurring cycles in her public life? Can she manage a functional, and focused, national campaign?

That probably can’t be fully answered unless and until Hillary Clinton clarifies whether she plans to run for president. Only then, when she assembles a new team and makes clear whether she is bringing on new blood amid the old Clinton hands, will it become clear what the latest iteration of a Clinton campaign looks like.

Unwanted coverage of the Clinton Foundation and the years leading up to Hillary Clinton’s arrival at its office has converged with the messiness of the Weiner-Abedin story. There has also been an element to some of the details in both storylines — people taking sides in a semipublic way in media accounts — that left some recalling the airing of dirty laundry after her 2008 campaign.

Her supporters say it’s not the Clintons’ fault that the husband of one of the former secretary of state’s closest aides had more private baggage dumped in the middle of his mayoral campaign. And the Clintons were only trying to fix the internal problems at the family foundation detailed in a New York Times piece last week that highlighted questions about lax oversight and conflicts of interest, those same backers argue. The story described budgetary concerns and Bill Clinton’s own determination two years ago that things were “a mess” organizationally.

They also insist that the Clinton operation is stronger and leaner throughout than before. And the foundation has had some of the growing pains one would anticipate from what Clinton officials have called a “start-up.”

The consensus among Clinton allies whose support dates back decades is some version of this: Bill Clinton and his wife have done enough good work to mitigate the periodic bouts of negativity from their world.

“I think the Clinton-haters come out of the woodwork,” he said. “And if anybody thinks that’s not gonna happen they’re crazy. And I think if we’ve learned anything through all of this you deal with it is as it is and things turn out pretty good. Yes, it’s a little bit, ‘Oh God. We went through that [in the 1990s]. If the Clintons come back we’re just gonna have the viciousness and the anger of the ’90s. … [without anyone named Clinton] we’ll get a fresh start.’